The only problem I can see with it is that it's still as expensive as an iPad. There's no brand strength in android for 10 inch tablets and the 7 inch tablet market is covered by the Nexus 7 and a few other more established brands - not to mention that a big portion of the 7 inch market that's taken up by the "look at the size of my fucking phone" crowd of new 5.5"+ phones like the Galaxy Note series.

So if you don't have the brand strength, you kind of need to incentivise the purchase with a lower price (this is exactly why the 7 inch android market is doing so well, Nexus 7, Kindle Fire and a few others are priced far below their competition).

The way to be the best seller isn't to produce the absolute nicest product, it's to produce a product that does everything the customer wants at the lowest price while still keeping performance bearable.

My New TV still has a coaxial aerial port and several SCART ports, and what it doesn't have a Chinese ebay seller will always be able to provide a converter for. Unless you reckon China and online sales are going away too.

There's plenty of gaming pensioners who only started in their old age, so I can very much see me still being a gamer in 50-70 years, health permitting..

Re: Fiar use policy?

There's a greater chance of David Icke admitting he's full of shit than there is of 3d 4k resolution games that even run at 30FPS on the next Playstation or Xbox (Unless the game is as graphically complex as Bit.Trip.runner). The graphics card will at best be about as powerful as a Radeon HD 7850. Nothing to sniff at but not something that will run Skyrim in 3d at 4k resolution at 60FPS.

Reads like a "Top Gear" Review

Much like Clarkson saying he loves a crap car because of something he feels in his trousers rather than his head, the vreview basically admits that it's overpriced and underspecced but says "I love it anyway"

Re: A major omission

TF2 is kind of a shame, it was so astonishingly well balanced and now it's just a bunch of random shit. I no longer can expect a soldier to have a rocket launcher, he probably has a laser rifle. Still good fun, but weird as fuck.

Left 4 Dead, why haven't I played that more? It's marvellous it really is.

Re: I've played 4 of those

There's a certain way to play Crysis that makes it a lot more fun; be gung ho as all hell, you'll soon get much better at quickly managing your suit, speed sprinting, switching to strength, shattering a guy's head with your gun butt, swiching to armour, shooting down his two squad mates, taking cover, going into stealth and picking off the last 2 guards before they know what's going on. It's fantastic fun when you learn to pull it off.

Sadly the fiddliness of the controls in Crysis makes it hard to learn to do this and and that just realdsto wandering around hiding in stealth mode, shooting 1 guy then going back to stealth for a while.

Re: Reverse tactics

Re: Reverse tactics

Well strictly speaking "Perverting the course of justice" by making it harder for undercover police to do their jobs. I'd like to avoid a 1984 style situation of the authorities always watching but I'm fairly sure that police surveillance of potential criminals is not the same as Big Brother watching.

Re: body temperature in mammals

If external temperatures were that much higher, we'd have difficulty losing heat and probably all die of overheating. You see this effect in people with lower constitution when it gets a bit hot in Britain, now imagine it being twice that hot and even the thick skinned and well hydrated are going to be struggling.

But it's been covered below by someone who knows a bit more than me as to why we remain that hot (and how close we are to disaster) a dangerously high fever is only about 6 degrees C above what we comfortably tick along at.

Why is the cover ONE HUNDRED DOLLARS? They could seriously help their marketing by making it a tonne cheaper, there's no way the materials cost is even a quarter of that, I'd be amazed if it costs even $10 to make.

I know economics is a thing, and the whole point is to make shit as cheaply as possible and sell them for as much as possible but jesus christ. $100 (even worse, £100 for us over here) is astronomically high for a cover with a little keyboard built into it.

While that's true with trolls, an above comment mentioned the full extent of what this trolling entailed. It was of a level that constitues harassment, which is a bit worse than being a team killing prickend in Counter Strike.

Ludicrous misuse of maths

.87 Million and 0.36 million respectively, I believe that doesn’t include digital sales though (VALVe don’t release steam sales stats)

So 17.4 million retail boxes of anno and 7.2 million PC retail boxes of AssCreedRev they were expecting.

Bear in mind that AssCreedRev shipped (not actually sold at retail, only sold to vendors) only 7 million copies across all platforms, he’s talking out of his arse as Consoles are much less commonly pirated on and bigger markets for derivative sequel-a-year crap

If the power is out, then the HAM radio wouldn't be intefered with by a device that requires power to transmit, surely?

In my honest opinion, Powerline adapters have a long way to go yet anyway, I keep considering them as a viable alternative to running cables around the house or Wireless but the tech isn't quite there. It's an asshole move, but if the tech could be there, then I really don't care about HAM Radio.

I hate to be that guy, but £2k is phenomenally expensive, even for a brand new extremely high spec gaming PC if you build it yourself.

£600 will do for a good gaming PC. I realise that's still a lot of money, but I'm posting in the interests of accuracy, not sanity. My current machine was about £1300 in total, but it'll last me 4-5 years unless I get the itch to be a bit childish and go spunk more cash on it.

I'm under the impression that DirectX has some functions that OpenGL does now have, can anyone give me the broad strokes of what OpenGL is missing?

I'm all for open platforms but as a "hardcore" gamer, I'm more interested in seeing graphical technology move on than taking a step back to widen the market. Unless OpenGL becomes so popular that the standard moves on a lot quicker. I'm happy with DirectX, and I'm happy using Windows as my gaming OS. I'm also happy to jump ship if the experience is as good.

Re: Technical question, why does FPS > 60 matter?

The human eye being "happy" with 24 FPS is a fallacy, we don't see in frames, but if we did, the theoretical limit would be more like 220 FPS, if you can't see the difference between 24 and 60 FPS you might be retarded.

24 FPS means that you get a new frame every 41.66666666(recurring) milliseconds, which is over double the average person's reaction time. which means that you can literally miss your opportunity to react at that frame rate, this is pretty important at a competitive gaming level.

I find that anything lower than 50 frames per second looks wrong to me, having been a PC gamer for years.

What the other guy said though, if you can do so much at 300 FPS, then it can be literally translated to doing 5 times as much at 60FPS, or at least 3 times as much at 100 FPS, which I would consider fine at a competitive level.

On the one hand, VALVe are the undisputed kings of PC gaming right now, they have influence, and steam being a ground for Linux versions of games will make more developers create working Linux versions.

On the other hand, the source engine is considered outdated by this point and in terms of graphically intensive games, Unreal Engine is still the big thing (and unreal Engine 4 probably will be the next big thing) so it's going to require UE4 working well in OpenGL to make any massive switch (note: I'm unsure on what exactly is going on with UE3 in terms of openGL compatability, or UE4, I'm a gamer, not a games artist, I've no idea how well these engines run in Open GL, just that when UE3 came out, it was a DirectX 9 Engine).

It would be interesting if the next big console used OpenGL, as that would drive more development to OpenGL, meaning better PC ports too.

Re: Radio?

Radio doesn't just mean AM/FM

And this isn't a suggestion to learn "how radio works" (not compeltely anyway) It's to learn about electrical engineering, something that's fucking hard (a lot harder than general computing for most people).

There's a massive lack of actual hard skills taught at school level in this country which means kids don't start learning the basics of stuff until later life unless they're hobbyists.

I really wish I'd been taught more about electrical engineering as a kid, instead we got a PCB and got told to solder some bits onto it, this didn't really teach me much outside of "You are bad at soldering".

Re: I still think

That's a good point, but there's nothing new or interesting coming out for the PS2, ever, and Ouya is a LOT more powerful than Sony's nigh immortal ridged box (what were those ridges for anyway? Very 80s HiFi styled for a very late 90 product).

I don't really want to defend Ouya too much as while I love it as a concept, I'm fairly sure it's doomed to fail as a business. "more powerful than other console" and "a great original idea" is not a surefire sign of ubiquity, the GP32 and it's successors already tried being a massively more powerful, open source handheld and that didn't go too well. Now I admit that the GP32 (and Co.) were pricier than the alternative, but I'm not sure price is enough to sway people.

Seems to be priced for "$99, why the hell not at that price?"

My hand keeps hovering over the button to pay $99 now and get the console on release, purely because this thing is priced the same amount as 6 hours or so on Canal Street with the other half (I am a prolific drinks buyer and consumate gentleman so I mostly pay for everything, so I actually make out pretty well only spending ~£60 in that time).

But I have a few concerns.

It's fabulously hard to become a successful hardware manufacturer today. There's a reason SEGA essentially died, why Atari's last successful console was like 30 years ago when their last console was about 15 years ago. It's because they didn't sell that well. Even with the kickstarter preorders they're looking at an install base of 40,000. Which is sweet fuck all. It won't entice any big developers. Likely this means it'll be stuck with ports of mobile phone games and a few bones thrown by some smaller indies. That's fine for the Ouya guys, they might be able to sustain this and make their money from it. But it'll die quite quickly

Bear in mind that of that $2.5m, $1,774,733 is literally preorders for the console, and a big chunk of the remainder is a small (sub 1000) number wealthy(ish) people (In fact, at levels lower than the preorder level, the kickstarter has only provided about $22,000).

I also worry that they're dangerously close to offering more consoles than they can have made, their initial backer "preorder" was 1000 consoles, which sold in minutes, so they added 5000 more, then another 5000, then another 10,000. Failing to deliver on this could fairly massively damage all the goodwill gained from making somethign unique, interesting and open source.

Ouya is the kind of thing that gets a cult following, and things like that can be successful, but I think they need to shoot for a higher install base than "cult", or developers won't be interested. Lack of developers leads to the install base not growing as people become disinterested, leads to lack of developer interest leads to....etc.

I'm starting to suspect that the initial buzz for Ouya has already peaked on Kickstarter, don't expect to see it make 2.5 million in a day again, or even 1.5 million, I think everyone who wants to know or cares to know about Ouya probably already knows and probably has already backed (give or take a few, give or take double or even triple the amount of the current backers, it's still too small an install base).

Hm, I'm not sure the reasoning of "It's because mobile advertising works!" Is the true reason for these metrics, more likely that younger "cooler" people prefer Obama and are more likely to own smartphones, which is very clearly reflected in their figures for people past retirement age reversing the trend provided by the total figures.

Will anyone actually care?

From my experience of environmental types (especially environmental types who own Apple products), this won't make much of a difference. Environmentalism is a massive bandwagon and very few people in on it are really that interested in it if it inconveniences them.

Re: More importantly...

I'll be glad when WiGig comes as the name will make sense at least...The pedant in me is furious at the term "WiFi" as the "Fi" stands for nothing. WiFi is literally named that because it rhymes with HiFi :(

Re: Not a real alternative

Please remember to add 20% VAT to the price after conversion from dollars to pounds. You'll likely be charged a 20% VAT cost on import which will bring it up to £180, add shipping cost and you're likely paying over £200.

Personally, I'm waiting till it's actually released, I'd like to see some end user reviews. There's things a normal person will point out that even the most scathing journos will let slide. Plus I'd like a definitive answer on whether the USB port can host an SD card like some people are saying.

Re: 'Dave 126 Rule 2

In my experience of this, you're more or less right. So long as you stop it running power through it ASAP.

I've managed to save keyboards and whole laptops from coffee spills by yanking the power and the battery and actually cleaning the circuit board with clean water then drying throughly. Not always an option on newfangled tiny integrated devices that're held together by adhesives but laptops don't need to die due to coffee.

Re: Gay wars

Just out of interest...

...Is there usually upward motion around the launch of say a new MS OS or several years after said launch as more companies come to the new OS (it being unwise to be an early adopter in corporate environments)?

I've been around for a few rollouts, but they typically involved putting Win7 on the existing hardware.

I'm interested to know as I've only a limited knowledge of whether this actually impacts hardware sales and if, therefore, some of the workstation/desktop slump is to do with the fact there hasn't been a new OS to buy new hardware for for a while now. Is part of this normal course as the latest windows reaches market saturation?

Word has it that...

Re: Nanny state...

How about a button and a speaker that, upon detection asks you to press the button in the next minute to avoid the automated call? That way, if you're incapacitated the call is made, if you're not, you press a button.

Given the problems these little bastards cause, they should re-release the 6 legged one if it makes it more clumsy and keep capturing healthy ones in hopes that this bad mutation continues and it slows the toads down in general.

Re: Interesting little device

I'm confused...the "dock" you linked is just a charging stand it seems, however you can still use the standard "dock connector" the micro USB one, there's a choice of one or the other, see? So while there is a proprietary dock connector, there's also a STANDARD one too.

Re: $49 for 8GB

I'm a real bastard for wanting a lot of files on a device so I can access them, say a whole series of Family Guy to watch while in several long journeys without going back to my storage at home....nope, won't fit on 8 gig. and I don't want to pay £40 for 8 gig more storage so a £13 32GB micro SDHC card would've done me fine.